Latest Orobanchaceae Stories

Versatile and responsive to management, corn is grown throughout the world for everything from food to animal feed to fuel. A new use for corn could soon join that list, as researchers in China investigate the crop's ability to induce "suicidal germination" in a devastating parasitic weed. Known commonly as sunflower broomrape, the weed causes extensive damage to vegetable and row crops in Asia, Africa, and southern Eastern Europe. Lacking chlorophyll, it is a parasite and completely...

A botanist from the Missouri Botanical Garden recently spotted a rare parasitic plant that hasn't been seen in more than 20 years.St. Louis botanist George Yatskievych stumbled upon the plant in a pine oak forest in the mountains. The plant has a pine cone-shaped dense cluster of flowers and juicy celery-like stalks.It's "weird and wonderful," says Yatskievych."I've always been interested in plants that don't conform to our preconceived notion of what a plant should be,"...